Oracle lords it over HP and IBM with SPARC T4

Oracle has announced the release of its SPARC T4, claiming the largest generational performance increase in the history of the processors.

And naturally Oracle reckons that its new server line blows away anything that IBM and HP can muster.

Compared with the IBM Power 780, Oracle claims that the SPARC T4-4 server delivers a 2.4 fold better performance per socket. Compared with Larry Ellison’s favourite company’s option, an HP Superdome 2 with 16 Itanium processors, Oracle says it delivered 5.7 times the performance per socket.

It is also claimed that the Solaris running servers were able to beat a “world record in Java applications”.

The new SPARC system, aimed at “every tier in the enterprise”, includes built-in virtualisation, on-chip cryptographic acceleration, and dynamic threads.

According to a statement released today the servers focus on mission critical single threaded concurrent workloads, and enable users to tie up a number of application tiers into one server. This means a reduction in system complexity.

According to executive vice president at Oracle, John Fowler, the T4 can offer up to five time performance improvements, cheekily claiming that third parties have started placing orders to “replace outdated systems from our competitors.”

The servers will support the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 which is “world’s fastest general-purpose engineered system” after being unveiled by Ellison.

Apparently it has beaten nine world record benchmarks, running at twice the speed of HP and IBM systems, with just half the costs running database and enterprise applications.

The SuperCluster will support all current Solaris applications as well as the upcoming release of Solaris 11.

The SPARC cluster will support up to four compute nodes and four terabytes of memory in a single rack, with provision for up to eight racks.